The Veil – A symbol of Western Oppression

April 30, 2010

By Saiful Islam

Western oppression? The veil is not imposed by the West! I hear people say. That’s right, the West does not impose the wearing of the veil. The free and “civil” West promotes its liberty by stripping their women and plastering them on massive billboards, rendering them into a commodity and tool to be abused by the capitalist system of exploitation.

Belgium of course is at the forefront of this “imposition” of removing the “symbol of oppression” as certain MPs called it. The lower house of the Belgian parliament have passed legislation which will ban the wearing of the veil in public places.

The argument of being veiled and “oppressed” has been dealt with previously. Here, it is suffice to say that it is not difficult to see who the real oppressors are. Where a woman previously had the liberty of wearing the veil, she now simply cannot. That right to dress in accordance with one’s religious conviction has been taken away. Those devout enough not reveal their faces may not even want to come out anymore – so much for forcing “integration” down the throats of Muslims. The veil is indeed the symbol of oppression, but not from the perspective of the woman, but rather from the perspective of the twisted elite who wish to dismantle Islam and impose their ethnocentric, biased and often erroneous understanding upon Muslim women – a Western oppression no less.

One genuinely questions the security threat argument that they use to justify this ban. If the argument for identification is given then there is nothing wrong with a policewoman politely stopping the veil-clad sister and asking her to remove her veil. When you consider this and the fact that only 30 Muslim women out of the half a million Muslim women actually wear the veil in Belgium, then this piece of legislation seems like overkill and a sham. It is a sham for two reasons.

The first is because Christian Europe cannot tolerate Muslims becoming devout – after all its imperialism suffered at the hands of the likes of sterling men such as Salahudeen al-Ayubi and Nurrudin Zingi both of whom were pious scholars in their own right. During the colonial rule it was the pious scholars who led the Jihad against the Colonialists.

Historically the West have used the veil as a benchmark to determine the religiosity of Muslims – conveniently ignoring the nuns who cover themselves head to toe and a group of them barring themselves from entering into the public realm – they of course are not oppressed – they are merely serving themselves to the cause of Christianity.

In the early 20th Century, the Rockfeller Foundation sent Ruth Frances Woodsmall on an eighteen month trip to the Muslim world to study the changing state of Muslim women under the influence of colonial rule. She searched for signs of Westernisation and concluded that,

“Undoubtedly the barometer of social change in the Moslem world is the veil.”

This evil piece of cloth, it seemed, was a barrier to “progress” or rather, the imposition of corrupt Western morality and the dedicated agenda to remove Islam from the hearts of the Muslims and as a result, any resistance which the Colonialists may face when raping the resources of Muslim world. The sickening report of Woodsmall is steeped in ethnocentric bias, applauding the imposition of bans on the veil by secularist leaders in the Muslim lands even at the expense of basic rights – much like today.

Thus it is no surprise that the same Western Europe which saw the veil as a threat to its imperialist endeavours, utilises the same basic centuries old arguments to ban it today, perhaps in the hope that Muslims will compromise their Deen. As Allah mentions in the Glorious Qur’an:

Never will the Jews or the Christians be satisfied with thee unless thou follow their form of religion. (2:120)

As a Muslim(ah), it is incumbent for us not to cave into such tactics and instead be a means through which the Deen of Allah is preserved and protected.

The second reason it is a sham is because legislation to marginalise 0.006% of the MUSLIM population has been introduced in Belgium yet no legislation has been introduced, no PREVENT scheme has been devised; no houses have been raided three o’clock in the morning to intercept the institutional paedophilia sweeping Europe’s Roman Catholic Church.

The worldwide abuse and rape of children by the Christian clergy has not even twinged the legislatures of various countries to introduce regulations which would manage the interaction of innocent children and vile Catholic priests. Belgium is most certainly no exception to this systemic sexual abuse. The fact that the Vatican had issued commands to their Bishops to cover up child sex abuse cases years ago is a cause for serious concern. Yet where are the MPs saying that the Vatican and the Catholic Church have backward, archaic understanding which leads sexual abuse of children? Where are the Sarkozys who wish to liberate the “oppressed” children? No where – the perpetrators are not Muslims; the intrinsic hatred for Islam and Muslims is not reciprocated upon the Catholic clergy.

The attacks on the religion of Islam do not only affect sisters who wear the veil, it affects those sisters who do not wear the veil, it affects those Muslims who are not male and it affects each and every Muslim of this world regardless of race. It is a Muslim issue. Today the veil is banned; tomorrow it will be, as in France, the Hijab. Iteratively, the Muslim woman’s dress code will be erased and thus her identity as a Muslim jeopardised.

It is therefore a time to act; a time to resist this Western oppression. The identity of the Muslim is slowly being eroded away. Over in America, the same happened to the black community. Their rights were not given, and if they were, they were not enforced. It was time for a revolution. A bloodless revolution. The “oppression” today with the Muslims is perhaps not so explicit as it was during the 1960s with the black people in America, but it is certainly there. And it is gathering momentum. The time for a revolution is dawning upon us.